Help on creating a new way to hold a custom weapon.

[NeighborlyNinja]

I have a custom weapon that has been completely implemented into the game (P90C), but the way a character holds the weapon and reloads it is completely inaccurate and ugly looking. How can I create an original stance and reload animation for this particular weapon? I have blender, G.E.C.K, and FOMM if those programs help. I'm a newbie at blender, but I think I could pull through if I was given good direction. (Yes, I already tried every stock weapon holding animation and didn't like any of them)

[Ghogiel]

You need to make several new animations, so you need blender. that's about all the advice I have.

 

It's already been years, so correct me if I am wrong, but isn't there like 2 unsed animation sets? somewhere in there... Probably was a forward thinking on BGS just incase a DLC needed to make use of them, If so you will have to replace one of those, if not then you will have to replace one for a current vanilla weapon, as the list is finite and you cannot add new ones to the list.

[NeighborlyNinja]

You need to make several new animations, so you need blender. that's about all the advice I have.

 

It's already been years, so correct me if I am wrong, but isn't there like 2 unsed animation sets? somewhere in there... Probably was a forward thinking on BGS just incase a DLC needed to make use of them, If so you will have to replace one of those, if not then you will have to replace one for a current vanilla weapon, as the list is finite and you cannot add new ones to the list.

How do I go about editing one of those animations? Which files do I edit and how do I attach the custom animation to the gun.

[Ghogiel]

off the top of my head: extract the meshes BSA. the animations are all in meshes\characters\... um I want to say animations? but that doesn't sound right. anyway you'll see it. there will also be a 1stoperson folder for 1st person animations...but ignore that for the moment. you see all the animations are labelled so you can tell what is what. you get a preffix: 1hm, 1hp, 2ha. which is 1 hand melee, 1 hand pistol, 2 hand assault. or close to that description. and a suffix of a letter. the middle part of the KFs name is going to be self explanatory, ie equip, holster, reload, etc

 

when you are setting up the weapon in the GECK under the Art and Sound tab, you have things like the attack, reload, and grip animations. IIRC.. going on mem here, these have letters, and correspond to the suffix I mentioned... and you will see there is an Animation type, this is the prefix. Or something like that. What shows up in the drop downs are hard coded lists..

 

That is probably a bit wrong, but it's roughly how the various vanilla animations are connected to an specific weapon.

 

What you would want to do is see if there is an unused letter somewhere, by comparing what is used in game and what is actually showing up in the lists. I could be wrong that there is an unused set. I want to say 7 for some reason. :unsure:

 

now what you wan to do is pick an animation set that is basically close, duplicate all the files, replace one of the unused sets, (if I am not making that up other wise you are screwed) and import and edit them in blender one at a time to work correctly. Which is not going to be that straight forward.

Edited May 24, 2011 by Ghogiel

[NeighborlyNinja]

I did as you said and got a bunch of .kf files from the Meshes bsa. How can I edit them with blender?

[Ghogiel]

by importing them. you will need the skeleton in the scene first though.